Josh Brolin

Hollow Man 2000

Hollow Man is a timely, millennial reworking of the 1933 sci-fi classic The Invisible Man. The original - based on the HG Wells novel - made a household name out of Claude Raines and was directed by another film legend, James Whale (Frankenstein). This invisible update has high-brow origins according to its director, Dutch-born US emigre Paul Verhoeven (Starship Troopers, Total Recall, Robocop). Although scripted by Andrew W. Marlowe (Air Force One) as a fairly straight action movie, Verhoeven, always ...

No Country for Old Men 2007

A scorching blast of tense genre filmmaking shot through with rich veins of melancholy, down-home philosophy and dark, dark humor, “No Country for Old Men” reps a superior match of source material and filmmaking talent. Cormac McCarthy’s bracing and brilliant novel is gold for the Coen brothers, who have handled it respectfully but not slavishly, using its built-in cinematic values while cutting for brevity and infusing it with their own touch. Result is one of the their very best films, ...

Sicario

Making a film with fine performances, adept direction, first-rate photography and a doltish screenplay is like starting a rock band with no drummer. The result may yield satisfying, even memorable moments. But every time you try to build momentum, the project falls apart.
Take “Sicario.” A Mexican drug cartel identifies FBI agent Kate Macer (Emily Blunt) and sends a corrupt cop (Jon Bernthal) to torture her to learn what she knows, then kill her. He goes to a bar where she ...

American Gangster

American Gangster is a modern crime classic; it rightly stands alongside The Godfather and Goodfellas as one of the most brutal, uncompromising, flat-out-brilliant portrayals of crime in America ever put to the screen. Magnetic leading performances anchor this terrific ensemble: Ridley Scott has crafted a brilliant film here.
Riveting, superbly produced adaption of a true-life story, based around Harlem Drug King and gangster Frank Lucas, and an honest cop looking to bring him down. American Gangster is a tour-de-force film from ...

Hail, Caesar!

A retreat from the ruminative, dramatic comedies that have marked Joel and Ethan Coen's last few films, Hail, Caesar! is their most manic work since Burn After Reading. Where the 2008 film farcically took aim at the organized chaos of the Bush administration, the Coen brothers' latest occurs on a Hollywood studio lot beset by internal and external pressures. So many scattered scenes and plotlines intertwine that metatextual layers start to break down, to the point that the narrator for ...

True Grit

A Western way of life - It's so easy to forget Westerns and what they have meant to Hollywood over the years. But, the reality is, Westerns are what helped shape the Hollywood we know now and had technology not grown like it did the past 100 years, we might enjoy what a Western brings to the table a bit more. With that said, it's a good thing the Coen brothers are around, as without them, we would get little ...

Men in Black 3

When you walk into the movie theatre to see "MIB3" you are not going to see a 'deep' film but to be entertained and "MIB3" is entertaining--maybe mindless, but entertaining. It has been 15 years since the first "Men in Black" and though it helps to have seen that for a better understanding about the relationship between agent J (Will Smith) and agent K (Tommy Lee Jones) it's not a necessity . It seems like every 2 minutes there is ...